Broken Harts, Episode 5: Full Transcript

Speaker 1: Dispatch, can I help you? Who are we checking on?

Speaker 2: The mothers are Sarah and Jennifer Hart, and according to my intake, they have six children in the home.

Speaker 1: Six children in the home. OK.

Speaker 2: The eldest being 19, so not technically visually a child.

Speaker 1: OK.

Speaker 2: The children are in range between 19 and 12, according to my intake.

Speaker 1: OK, and are you with CPS or you are a concerned citizen?

Speaker 2: No, I'm with CPS.

Speaker 1: In Cowlitz County?

Speaker 2: Yes, ma'am.

Speaker 1: OK, let's see here.

Speaker 2: I've been to the home Monday and Friday. I knocked on the door just this morning and no one…I could get no response.

Speaker 1: Are you there now?

Speaker 2: No, unfortunately.

Speaker 1: You've tried two times and you can't reach them?

Speaker 2: Correct, I've knocked on the door twice. Different cars have been moving in and out, I noticed. I feel like someone's there.

Speaker 1: OK, and so when were you there last?

Speaker 2: This morning, 9:15, 9:30.

Speaker 1: OK, I've got a deputy on the way, and he will call you back when he has something to tell you, OK?

Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I appreciate your time.

Speaker 1: All righty. Thanks, have a good day. Bye.

Liz Egan: The call you just heard came in the day the Harts died. You can hear the operator speaking with a case worker from Clark County social services, requesting a wellness check at the Hart family's home in Woodland, Washington. The caseworker was responding to a call from Dana DeKalb, who lived next door with her husband, Bruce, and shared a driveway with the Harts. She wasn't the first person to report the Harts to the authorities. You may recall that her own dad had reported them four months earlier.

Speaker 4: Hi, how can I help you?

Dana Dekalb's father: Yeah, there's some kids that I feel is being highly abused in Woodland, Washington. Basically, my son-in-law is like most people. They don't want to get involved, and so he's keeping my daughter out of it, but since he's told me about it, I just can't live with it. I'm very concerned for these kids.

Liz Egan: So how did these women, adventurous, tree-hugging, free-spirited peaceniks, as Jen called them on Facebook, go from being groovy, idealistic trailblazers to moms who abused their kids and drove off a cliff, and when did the abuse begin? From Glamour and How Stuff Works, this is Broken Harts. I'm Liz Egan.

Justine Harman: And I'm Justine Harman.

Liz Egan: Here's Lauren Smiley talking with Amy Olstad Restad, whose son went to Woodland Elementary School with the Harts.

Lauren Smiley: Describe what you did see when they were there, going to the same school as your kids. Just walk me through what you knew about the Harts.

Amy Olstad Restad: They just caught your eye. I can't—it's like, it's something you can't really.... They had an aura about them. Just seeing these five, and I only saw five of them because Markis must have been at the middle school by then. I can remember them all getting out and standing in a line and just waiting until they were all out in this line, and then they would just walk right in, just like little soldiers. We thought it was...my husband and I would talk about it and say, "Oh, I guess they're well-behaved." We thought they were all the same age, that's one thing that I do remember. Our son was in kindergarten then, and we thought they were small, so we thought they had to be in kindergarten.

Justine Harman: The kids Amy saw from her car window were the Harts. Abigail, Hannah, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Sierra. The woman dropping them off would have been Jen. At this point Sarah was working full-time at Herberger's while Jen stayed home with the kids.

Liz Egan: If you've ever done school drop-off, you know the scene. Big backpacks, shuffling sneakers, maybe a little sister waving from the back seat. For lots of kids, the next seven hours are a drudgery to be endured. For the Harts, the school day might have been a welcome respite from what was going on at home.

Justine Harman: The abuse started in Alexandria, Minnesota, and it would follow the family across three states. We'll never know why Jen and Sarah moved so many times, but wherever they went, people noticed their kids odd, robotic behavior, their bruises, their hunger.

Liz Egan: Here's Ian Sperling, Jen and Sarah's friend who you've heard from before.

Ian Sperling: Looking back on it, it doesn't look like they were normal kids. They didn't really have friends. They didn't hang out with other kids, and yeah, that's one of those red flags when I stated that in my post, like, Duh, that's one of the other things looking back on, I'm like, Why didn't we notice they didn't have friends? The kids weren't allowed to just go hang out with friends.

Liz Egan: The paper trail starts on September 19, 2008. According to a police report, someone on the staff at Washington Elementary School noticed a suspicious bruise on Hannah Hart's arm. She was six, and this was her second week of first grade. Did a teacher see it first? A cafeteria aid? The school nurse? According to a police report, Hannah told someone at school that her mother had struck her with a belt. Devonte was nearly six too, most likely adjusting to life in a different kindergarten class. Markis was somewhere else in the same building. He was 10. Did Hannah tell her brothers what had happened while they waited for Jen to come pick them up after school? Here's what we know. When Sarah and Jen were questioned, they told the police that the bruise on Hannah's arm was probably from a fall down the stairs. Eight stairs, to be exact, which is an odd detail to have on the tip of your tongue. I've walked from the first floor of my house to the second one at least a thousand times over the 13 years we've lived there, and I couldn't tell you how many stairs there are.

Justine Harman: Two months later, a week before Thanksgiving break, Jen and Sarah withdrew Hannah, Devonte, and Markis from Washington Elementary School to be homeschooled. This must have been a terrifying moment for the kids. Relinquishing their cubbies and their spots on the rug. What was running through their minds when they left the classrooms that day? Was Markis, who was in the fifth grade, relieved to be sprung from the looming specter of long division? Were they dreading being stuck in the house all day with Jen? Jen painted a colorful picture of homeschooling on Facebook. Lessons on the beach, meditation on the deck, art class on the dining room table, but who knows how long the days were for her six students, and how much they might have missed having classmates who weren't their siblings, and a teacher who wasn't their mom?

Liz Egan: In September 2009 the Hart family took a road trip so Jen and Sarah could get married in a civil ceremony in Connecticut, where same-sex marriage was legal. For the next eight years, Jen would mark their anniversary on Facebook, showing the two of them in front of a waterfall or a thicket of evergreens, alongside a flowery ode to her bride, who by all accounts was not a regular user of social media. "When we were finally able to get married," Jen wrote in 2017, "the only people present were our children, simply because our support system was so small." That same fall, all five school-aged Hart kids were reenrolled in public school. Later, Jen and Sarah would tell a social worker that this was a requirement of their adoption agency. So off the older five went. Markis, Hannah, Devonte, Abigail, and Jeremiah. Sierra stayed home with Jen. "You beautiful thing, you," Jen wrote about her on Facebook.

Justine Harman: According to a police report in November of 2010, Douglas County social services got another call from school. This time the subject was Abigail, who was in the first grade. She'd been stealing classmates' food and digging through the garbage, looking for scraps. Later that month Abigail reported "owies" to her teacher. According to a report compiled three years later by the Oregon Department of Health and Human Services, and I'm quoting here, "Abigail had bruising on her stomach area, from her sternum to waistband, and bruising on her back from mid back to upper buttocks,” reportedly caused by Jen Hart, according to Abigail, but in the CPS interview with the couple, Sarah Hart said she was the one responsible for the marks. The worker said this incident was over a penny. They had discovered a penny in Abigail's pocket and asked her about it. Abigail had said she found it. Jen and Sarah Hart did not believe her, and said she stole the penny and was lying about it, hence the spanking, "which got out of control," per Sarah Hart. Abigail also said they put her head under cold water, and Jen had her "two hands on her neck."

Liz Egan: Investigators interviewed the other Hart kids, who said they were often grounded, spanked, or sent to their rooms without food. But when Jen and Sarah were questioned separately, they told a different story. Sarah said she'd been the one who hit Abigail. Jen backed her up, and the investigators believed them. Maybe Jen had more to lose. She was the one who received monthly assistance checks from the state of Texas for adopting the kids out of foster care. She also received Social Security checks for Devonte and Jeremiah. All of these checks were in her name, and she might have believed a child abuse conviction would put these funds in jeopardy. The caseworker's report said, "The problem is these women look normal." Remember, Abi was the first kid Jen held in her arms, the one who made her a mom. She was the one who loved dance parties, and tried to teach the chickens how to do yoga. In one of the last pictures we see of her on Facebook, she's buckled into a roller coaster at the Oregon State Fair, smiling bravely by Sarah's side. This is the girl whose neck Jen held in her hands under cold water.

Justine Harman: The state filed charges against Sarah in state court for two gross misdemeanors, malicious punishment of a child and domestic assault. In December of 2010, Minnesota Child Welfare learned about a bruise on Hannah's hand. By this time she was in third grade. The year of chapter books, when you're not quite one of the big kids yet, but you know your way around the school. When she was questioned, Hannah said Jen hit her because she lied. She said Jen hit her all the time. Later the school nurse called the Harts to report that Hannah was asking her classmates for food. She said she hadn't eaten all day. Sarah's response was not the one you'd expect of a mother trying to put her best foot forward for the benefit of the authorities. She said of Hannah, "She's playing the food card. Just give her water." Hannah was the oldest sister, the one with the missing front teeth. There aren't many pictures of her on Facebook, but in the ones we do see, she appears shy and tentative. She was the one who would eventually jump out her bedroom window and run to the neighbor's in the middle of the night to tell them her moms were abusive, but that wouldn't happen until later. Much later.

Lauren Smiley: Ian Sperling says he hadn't seen much of the family in the year before they died. There were canceled plans, lots of them. He's been beating himself up over some of the signs he missed.

Ian Sperling: Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. My wife and I are beating ourselves up daily because why didn't we see this? Well, you couldn't. There's not a person I know, and even those two that said they followed up—I get the neighbors' following up because they probably saw more—but people who are friends or acquaintances of the Harts, there's no way they knew anything was wrong. It's not possible. Maybe if you really wanted to be a very critical, judgmental person, you may have said, "Well, they're too perfect. I'm gonna dive into this," or, "The kids are skinny." Well, we just thought they were eating organic food. In that scene there's a lot of people who are skinny, and I think the whole food thing…. Look, if I was not wanting to vilify or demonize Jen I would say, "Well, she didn't know how to punish them because six kids who have developmental disabilities are gonna be tough to raise." So maybe this was her way of trying to find a punishment that was appropriate, was, "Well, you're going to bed without dinner tonight," type of thing and it morphed into a bigger deal with regards to the neighbors finding out about it. Stuff like that. Who knows? That's one way to look at it. I think the more realistic way to look at it is she absolutely would withhold food from them quite a bit. I think another way to look at it was that's how she controlled them.

Liz Egan: On Tuesday, April 5, 2011, all six Hart kids were pulled out of Woodland Elementary School. This time they never went back. The Hart family was officially off the grid. The following year Sarah Hart was discharged from supervised probation in Minnesota and moved to Oregon to find a new job. We don't know how often the kids got to see Sarah during this time, but her absence must have been hard on them. They'd already had a lot of disruption in their lives. They'd been removed from the homes of their biological families—in some cases, families they would have remembered.

Justine Harman: During this time, on December 23, 2012, Jen had a car accident with the kids in Missoula, Montana. The car she was driving was the Yukon. The same one she was driving when she went off the cliff. As she described it on Facebook, "Once, twice, three times. Finally we crashed into the side of the gently sloping mountain in what was most likely seconds. So many inexplicable thoughts ran through my mind. Was I dead? There was no way we could have all survived such an incident. I unclenched my fist from the steering wheel, brushed off the glass, and turned my head back to see all six kids hanging upside down. 'Are you OK?' Every single child was safely secured by their seat belts." Jen then goes into a lengthy description of a couple who bent over backward to help them. Even offering to drive the Harts the rest of the way to Portland, where they were going to see Sarah.

Liz Egan: We weren't able to find any record of the accident Jen describes. However, after the Harts died, Brian Lee, the husband from the couple who offered to drive them that night, was interviewed by The Oregonian. He remembers meeting the family after they were involved in what he calls a rollover accident. He says he and his wife rented a trailer to tow the Harts' car to Spokane and that Jen talked through the entire three-hour drive. She must have been starved for adult company. Interestingly, Lee says the accident happened the day after Christmas, not two days before, as Jen said in her Facebook post. When she posted about the event years later, she made the family's survival sound like a Christmas miracle. The fact that the accident happened right before Christmas seemed to be the whole point. Of course, Lee might have been mistaken about the date, but this discrepancy could be yet another bit of evidence that Jen had her own interpretation of facts.

Liz Egan: A few months later, Jen and the kids reunited with Sarah for good in their new home in West Linn, Oregon, about 15 miles outside of Portland. Jen immortalized their goodbye on Facebook, leaving out the moms' brushes with the law. Here's what she wrote. "Packing the past ten years of my life into boxes. It's almost surreal walking through the house. Empty walls, empty drawers, empty cupboards, empty rooms. The kids' art supplies, instruments, games, and toys are packed. I was feeling kind of awful about the lack of things for them to do during the transition time. Until this morning, I was taking down the boys' bunk beds and heard the loudest, silliest, full-on belly laughs and guffaws coming from the other room. I walk in to see a trio of the kids sitting/laying on the bare floor. Not a single thing exists in that room aside from their little bodies. They were telling stories, making up silly songs, and laughing themselves into sprawled-out piles of utter bliss. Ah, yes. Simplicity at its finest. What a beautiful reminder that the things that matter most are not things at all. We have each other, our songs, our laughter, our love. These are the magic moments. Live, love, laugh." Ninety-two people liked this post.

Lauren Smiley: I headed south of Portland to the suburb of West Linn. It's Clackamas County, the area where Tonya Harding had grown up. I'd recently seen I, Tonya, so I'd been expecting the scrappy white working-class neighborhoods from the movie. Instead, on the bluff over the Willamette River and its mostly defunct paper mills is an upscale main drag filled with Pilates studios, a juice shop, a plastic surgeon offering Botox. The nearby streets are lined with tidy clapboard houses and picket fences, but two stuck out for being less manicured than the others. One had been the house that the Harts rented when they moved to Oregon, and next to it, the house of Bill Groener. Groener is in his sixties. Ruddy cheeks, belly, white goatee. You get the sense he'd be a really good mall Santa. Inside his house, an electric piano sits on his kitchen table, and his fridge is plastered with pictures of grandkids and a magnet that reads, "Pray without ceasing." This is Bill.

Bill Groener: You can hear baseball games up all the way up here from the park down below. A lot of waterskiing, a lot of boating. Actually, I've got two neighbors down here across the street that have boats. A lot of camping. The Harts loved to camp, I know, because it seemed like they were often going out on expeditions with their canoes on the top of their vehicle. They loved getting away, which is one reason I thought they were good parents in the regard that they were doing fun outdoors stuff for their kids. It seems like they'd been here maybe for three years. The first time I talked was at the mailbox. And one of them was—I think she worked up at Kohl's in Vancouver. I forget. Is that Sarah? She was the more open, friendly one. Not that the other lady wasn't friendly, but I talked to Sarah at the mailbox. Conversation came up once. There was something at the mailbox that she thought…I can't remember what it was, whether it was somebody had written something and put it in their mailbox, something that she talked like she thought that she had gotten away from that by coming out here. So that was an issue for her. Again, being, well, gay, I guess. That upset her. Basically, intimated that they had experienced that because she had mentioned that they had some problems before, and she didn't go into detail, but she was just conscious of being gay in our society. So I just thought, Well, maybe. I don't want her to think that I'm being judgmental, and I just want to be a good neighbor.

Liz Egan: We'd like to pause here to consider what Bill Groener is saying. Of course he doesn't want to be a bad neighbor. Nobody does. But we do think the pains Bill and others took to give Jen and Sarah a wide berth might have enabled their mistreatment of the kids. To be clear, we're not placing the blame on Bill's shoulders or anyone else's, but we do want to call attention to the very human tendency not to get involved. We believe it might have landed the Hart moms some free passes. Who wants to be the person who comes across as being homophobic, or racist, or close-minded? Or, as Bill himself said, judgmental. We're taught if you see something, say something, but we're also told you can't judge another woman until you walk in her shoes. If your neighbor's family looks different from yours, you might check yourself when you're questioning their decisions or their parenting, and in most cases that's the right thing to do. But where Jen and Sarah were concerned, political correctness might have provided them some cover for their double life.

Bill Groener: I mean, out front once in a while, I'd see the kids. Not very often, though. Not very often. I never saw them walking up the street or anything like that. They pretty much stayed in their yard. They were friendly, smile, would say hi, but didn't really carry on a conversation. I never saw any kind of friends or family over there visiting them. They didn't seem to come out, or they didn't come outside very often at all. Just stayed in the house a lot, so they were looking for land, saving up. It became evident the reason they were here was just as a stop-off place. With that many kids, this was a large house and a nice area. It's not like some places in Portland. You get some land and all that. They could have animals. I know they were working on getting the financing together. I remember when they were talking about that. They wanted to get back to the garden, as we used to say in the seventies.

Liz Egan: The Harts were in West Linn for four years before they moved an hour North to Woodland, Washington, to the house next door to the DeKalbs. They never registered as homeschoolers, so for a while at least, the State of Oregon didn't know about six of its newest residents. But that would change in 2013.

Justine Harman: While Jen's Facebook account was at maximum activity with near-daily posts throughout the year, two whistle-blowers reported the family to CPS. The first call came in on July 18, a few weeks after Jen posted a picture of a painfully thin Devonte playing guitar.

Liz Egan: "Me: 'Any particular reason you're naked?' Him: In the most matter-of-factly fashion, 'I'm not naked. I'm wearing a guitar.' Yep. That's my string bean."

Justine Harman: According to the CPS report, the first informant, who was anonymous, said, "Jen does this thing for her Facebook page where the kids pose and are made to look like one big, happy family, but after the photo event, they go back to looking lifeless." The same whistle-blower said Jen had allowed each kid only a single slice of pizza for dinner, and when it turned out that someone had helped themselves to more during the night, she punished all six kids by making them wear sleeping masks and lie on an air mattress for five hours. The whistle-blower noted that the kids would eat freely while Jen wasn't around, but once she entered the room, they denied that they'd eaten at all.

Liz Egan: The second whistle-blower identified herself as Alexandra Argyropoulos. She was a friend the Harts had stayed with when they traveled to San Francisco that summer. On Facebook we see Devonte in a zebra unitard, again, whippet thin, flashing a hang-loose sign in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. The caption: "Good morning, City by the Bay." In a statement after their deaths, Argyropoulos said Jen ran the family "like a regimented boot camp," not letting the kids cry and punishing them for laughing too loudly. Also according to Argyropoulos, "True kindness, love, and respect for the kids was largely absent."

Justine Harman: Child welfare visited the West Linn house in August of 2013 and interviewed each of the kids separately, despite their moms' hesitation about that arrangement. According to a CPS report, Devonte volunteered to go first, and all of the kids' answers were nearly identical. None mentioned past episodes of abuse, and Markis said he was grateful to the moms for changing his life. One social worker noted that with the exception of Devonte, "The kids appeared very reserved, and showed little emotion or animation." When it was their turn to speak to caseworkers, Jen and Sarah said Abigail had been "labeled borderline mentally retarded," but they didn't believe the diagnosis and that Jeremiah was "globally delayed—possibly even autistic." They also explained Hannah's missing front teeth like this. "She had knocked them out while running on a hardwood floor the year before." Hannah told the CPS workers, "She needed to wait until she was 17 to get a retainer with teeth."

Liz Egan: The caseworker's report noted that Jen was "adamant" that many of the family's issues stemmed from others' not understanding their alternative lifestyle. Jen said she only disciplined the kids by talking to them or making them meditate for five minutes. A doctor who examined the kids for the Oregon Department of Human Services found all but one of the Hart kids—Jeremiah—behind in their growth to the point of falling off, in some cases way off, the chart for their ages. Still, a handwritten cover letter atop their report states, "The doctor had no concerns whatsoever with any of the children." Even so, the doctor recommended that a caseworker monitor the family and request follow-up physicals in six months. This never happened. On October 25, 2013, the same week her six kids were examined on behalf of the state, Jen posted a picture of Devonte holding a homemade piggy bank painted like a globe with a caption that said, "He had the whole world in his hands."

Justine Harman: Up next time on Broken Harts.

Speaker 11: They was wrong, wrong, wrong. Moving them kids out of [inaudible]. And I'm not racist.

Ian Sperling: There's a lot of white saviorism symbolic in this story now that I had never understood or knew about.

Speaker 12: These kids were being used as a prop.

Speaker 13: The fact that that would be utilized as a way to mask some of the abuse and neglect that was happening within the home is just disturbing.

Ian Sperling: It's tough. We loved those kids so much.

Liz Egan: For access to exclusive photos and videos, and documents about the case, visit glamour.com/brokenharts. Have questions for us about this podcast? Reach us on Twitter @GlamourMag or @BrokenHartsPod. If you like what you heard, leave us a review. Broken Harts is a joint production between Glamour and How Stuff Works, with new episodes dropping every Tuesday. Broken Harts is cohosted and cowritten by Justine Harman and Elisabeth Egan, and edited by Wendy Naugle. Lauren Smiley is our field reporter. Samantha Barry is Glamour's editor in chief. Julie Shen and Deanna Buckman head up the business side of this partnership. Joyce Pendola, Pat Singer, and Luke Zaleski are our research team. Jason Hoch is executive producer on behalf of How Stuff Works, along with producers Julia Weller, Ben Kuebrich, and Josh Thane. Special thanks to Jenn Lance.

Top photo by Holly Andres.

To view a transcript of episode four, click here.